John Boehner Is All Outta Steam

One place this effort decidedly is not gaining steam is at the House Speaker’s office, because John Boehner says he’s going to put together a quickie short-term resolution to keep the government funded (well, 80 percent funded, or whatever the current ratio of irresponsible deficits to confiscatory taxation happens to be.) It sounds like he’s trying to be polite to the Defund ObamaCare caucus, while simultaneously foreclosing the actual legislation..

Boehner feels pretty good about his chances of winning a shutdown showdown against Obama over sequestration:

On the sequester, Boehner reportedly said Obama is so “desperate to get rid of the sequester” that “he’ll shut down the government if Congress follows the law and funds the government at the levels his sequester mandates.”

“The president’s threat to shut down the government if we implement his sequester is not a defensible position,” Boehner reportedly said, insisting that the sequester Obama proposed should stay in place until Obama agrees to reforms that will put the country on a path toward a balanced budget. “The American people won’t stand for it, and we’re not going to be swayed by it.”

Oh, goody. We’ve got a fighting chance of keeping the existing law Barack Obama insisted upon – the final scrap of the great Budget Control Act of 2011, which has otherwise dissolved into the mists of Big Government spending history – if the Democrats throw another baby fit, stamp their feet, and refuse to throw themselves into the back-breaking task of running the government with two percent less spending than they really wanted. Republicans are eternally on the defensive against the Leviathan State, pouring all their political capital into desperate efforts to slightly slow it down before it gobbles up the next huge chunk of liberty.

That’s one reason Republicans keep getting these nasty surprises at the ballot box: the party base doesn’t bother to show up, because they don’t see much reason to make the effort. They’re certainly not excited about the prospect of adding another few Republicans to the perpetual GOP surrender negotiations against an all-powerful, increasingly lawless socialist State, which the Obama years have refined into a despotic White House and unaccountable Administration bureaucracy that occasionally invites the legislative branch over for tea, so it can be brought up to speed on the next round of power grabs it had better not oppose.

Boehner seems to favor the “delay” strategy against ObamaCare, saying the American people will think it’s only “fair” to delay mandates on families and small businesses, the same way Obama gave one to big business, using a scrap of the Constitution to blot the ink on his royal decree. I’d be more sympathetic to the Delay Caucus if I thought there was much of a chance they’d use the delay to hammer a stake into ObamaCare’s heart, but you know they won’t, even if the get the whole damn thing pinned down for a year and do well in the midterm elections. They might get their delay just because half of ObamaCare is currently suffering a series of cascade failures, but I’m not confident in the ability of nervous deal-makers – the guys who got rolled right off the “fiscal cliff” – to rally massive public support against the President’s crackpot health care scheme. You need an inspiring, dedicated, razor-sharp leader to put together such a rally, and every Republican in Congress who remotely fits that description is part of the Defund movement..